| Ad-hoc networking is a concept in computer communications, which allows users wanting to communicate with each other to form a temporary network, without any form of centralized administration or infrastructure. Each node participating in the network acts both as host and as router and must therefore be willing to forward packets for other nodes. For this purpose, a routing protocol is needed.; The goal of this research is to design a flexible and efficient routing scheme for a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). Because an MANET is composed of wireless mobile computing devices forming an ad-hoc network without existing wired infrastructure or base stations, the network topology changes frequently. Hence, routing in such a dynamic environment is a challenging task. Some previous routing schemes in mobile ad hoc networks include Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) [JM96], Cluster-Based Routing Protocol (CBRP) [KVCP97], and Temporally-Ordered Routing Protocol (TORA) [PC97], among others. In these routing schemes, some nodes may be loaded unnecessarily heavily, end-to-end delay may be high and these schemes are also hard to upgrade once they are in operation. To address these problems, a new routing algorithm using mobile agents is presented. Mobile agents are software entities that can move freely between network nodes, and can execute programs that they carry with them at whichever node they are currently running on. The approach proposed in this thesis is a demand-based routing algorithm that provides efficient routing at the application layer.; This new proposed routing scheme has been implemented in Java using Aglets [LOKK97]. In addition, the routing scheme was also simulated on a mobile ad hoc network simulator ANEJOS [SM01] to evaluate its performance. |
